"All your buried corpses now begin to speak." James Baldwin.
I love to title my post, but sorry, I don't have a title. I went to bed crying yesterday because a suppressed memory came back like a flashback in a horror movie.
My late mother was buried in Kaduna. I haven’t been able to visit her grave for over a decade because of the Southern Kaduna crisis and insecurity. I and my late elder sister once planned to fly by air to Abuja and take the train from Abuja to Kaduna, but then the kidnapping on trains along that axis started happening, and we couldn’t visit until my sister-mum died. I always tried to block North out of my mind, but I can’t. It was the place I called home in my formative years. Most of the people I consider family still live there.
When universalizing replaces particularism, it is sometimes due to a desire among some people to live in denial rather than confront the truth. They want to avoid accountability and evade their responsibilities. They don't want the mirror to be held up in their face. They want to maintain their public image instead of acknowledging their complicity in the suffering of others.
Universalism is one of the reasons I have reservations about people who say "All lives matter" when we say Black Lives Matter. BLM does not devalue the lives of others; instead, it highlights the specific experiences of certain individuals/groups who have historically existed in the "zone of non-beings." This logic also shapes the discourse, implying that terrorism in Nigeria impacts everyone equally. Such framing supplants truth for convenience. Conviction is sacrificed on the altar of comfort, and conscience is sacrificed for community.
Of the Chibok girls that were kidnapped, how many were Muslims? Was Leah Sharibu a Muslim? How many Muslim girls have been killed in the same manner as Deborah Samuel, who was murdered for requesting that a student WhatsApp page be maintained for academic purposes? How many Muslim clerics have been killed for preaching on the street, similar to the number of Christians who have been killed? How many times have northern Christians gone on rampages and pillaged because a Muslim journalist wrote an article about Jesus Christ that they don’t like? How many times have Christians banned anything for everyone because it violates their faith? When we prioritize "positive" national image and pseudo-patriotism over healing decades of oppression, silent dispossession, and repression, we are on the path to a troubled future.
I don’t want Nigeria to be militarily invaded, but I don’t always want the agony of people who have suffered silently for decades, whose suffering has been ignored, to be swept under the carpet because of some pseudo patriotism. I don’t want invasions because these people never leave once they enter; they fuel the crisis and turn it into a site to perform complicit Christian salvation rhetoric. But I also can’t watch and keep silent when fundamental groups invade farms, kill people, and sack a whole village while they keep asking us, "Where are the cows?"
